Blood

Well I haven't posted much in the last three weeks, but that is because not much has been going on. The "mini" block I am in now is very short, and the rest of the remaining test periods will be short as well. I have had classes on respiratory and renal diseases over the past three weeks, and now I have tests next Wednesday and Friday. This will mark the real end of block 7, then my last pre-clinical block starts the week after. Block 8 is three "mini" test periods, two with three weeks of class then a week of exams, then one very short one that is only two weeks of class then a week of exams. We cap it all off with our end of basic sciences final, which is supposed to mimic the step 1 in terms of content and format. We have to pass it to go on to rotations.

Respiratory has been interesting, and we have a good course director for it. Renal has had some very good professors, but it is just hard to get excited about the kidney.

One fun thing Lisa and I did a few weekends ago was go to a friends house and play a new game called Munchkin. I linked the regular version but we played a wild west themed edition of the game. Our experience with the game was good overall. It is a turn based card game that kind of resembles Magic + RPG elements. It becomes very political like Settlers, as people can gang up on others or help each other out.

It seems online that people have very mixed feelings about the game overall. The game has a very silly theme with cool artwork, but I could see how the novelty of it would be gone after a game or two. Plus, the deck costs $20, which is a lot for what is essentially a deck of cards. Also, you need level counters, which don't come with the game. Probably the biggest problem we had, since we played with 7 people, is that the game does not have a good mechanic to push a conclusion. You can very effectively gang up on whoever is leading, and you can actually lose levels which sets the game back. So I would be interested to see how it goes with 4 competitive players.

The only other interesting thing that happened over the past few weeks is that we did have a session at Baylor where we learned how to draw blood. The girl who practiced on me had already been drawing blood at Ben Taub for her work study, and she did fine. She had really good veins (which makes a HUGE difference), so I was successful on my first try. It is still a weird experience to stab a needle into someone's arm and take their blood. Skin is thicker than you might think.